Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday November 12, 2009 @05:24AM
from the take-a-peek dept.

paulraps writes "Forget Spotify and Skype: the latest strangely-named-but-hey-it's-free service from Sweden offers users streamed on-demand movies free of charge, has deals with two major Hollywood studios, and is called Voddler. Since its launch two weeks ago, the service has signed up a quarter of a million users and has almost the same number queuing for an invitation. After signing deals with Disney and Paramount, the company provides access to thousands of films, which are shown uninterrupted after a barrage of ads. The target is the file-sharing generation: 'Our customers can be sure that Voddler is totally legal, secure, and that there are no risks of computer viruses infecting their machines from downloaded files,' says executive vice president Zoran Slavic."

The "free" movies from Comcast on-demand suck and I would imagine those costs are somehow worked into your Comcast bill. I can't imagine free movies would be that great if they are only ad supported. Hollywood wouldn't give the rights to any movie actually worth seeing unless you pay the expensive royalties.

I can't imagine free movies would be that great if they are only ad supported.

TV was entirely free, supported by ads, for half a century. Are you saying that Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Wizard of Oz, Rebel Without a Cause, The Day the Earth Stood Still,, etc. are "not that great"? I saw all of them on ad-supported TV years before cable TV even existed.

I have been using voddler as a beta tester for a few weeks now and it works quite ok after the last client upgrade.
The first mac client was crap, nothing happened when I tried to login and it went fullscreen mode when started plus the program froze so I had to shut down the computer with forced shut down. After the latest client version I was logged in when I started the program, Voddler client is built on XBMC Media Center and you can only use the keyboard to navigate which can be quite annoying when navigating.
Browsing the few movies they have at the moment is fairly easy (only about 500 movies or so). First I get a commercial and then the movie plays nicely on just 10-12Mbit adsl line. I have heard that there was commercial breaks in the movies, but I haven't seen any commercial in a movie so far, just the commercial just before the movie starts which can be 10 minutes long or so.
For a beta I think it's a nice product which works quite well for me. Especially since the last update on the client which allows you to go into windowed mode which I forgot to mention further up in my text.
I believe that Voddler can be great once the new movies pop in and the beta goes into full product. The client has only crashed on me once and when I started it up again and found my movie I was looking at I could start where it ended.

because my ISP might traffic shape the crap out of my connection when i go over some arbitary limit and I might get interrupted by a phone call or the cat being sick on the sofa so it would be an advantage to have a cache of the movie.

because using bittorrent may be construed as supporting terrorism/CP by some stupid/evil/corrupt organisation I cannot afford to argue against in court.

It was hacked a while ago so you could do just that plus it removed the commercials. But it was noticed quite fast, because it disrupted the service so they had to close down for 2-3 days to fix it and thus released a new client which you needed to download and install so you could continue watching movies. That hole is plugged, but there could be more which hasn't been discovered yet.

It requires their own client? Wow, that was brave of you. Does the Linux version come in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions? If I would have to run THEIR client, I'd want to do so ONLY on a SAFE computer (that rules out all of Windows and I don't have a Mac).

Yes, it does require their own version of XBMC client. Here are the technical requirements:

Technical requirements for Voddler.

> A computer with a minimum of 1000 megahertz (MHz) or higher, memory 512 MB and 13 GB available space on your hard drive.
> Operating system of Windows Vista or Windows XP. In time for the official release, Voddler will also be available on Mac.
> Internet connection of a minimum of 2,5Mbit.
> UPnP enabled router or an open Internet connection
> 3G mobile broadband is NOT supported at this stage.
> Voddler recommends an ATI/AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA graphics controller that supports OpenGL 2.0 to fully experience the slick Voddler graphical interface. Please also make sure you have the latest graphics device drivers installed on your system.
> ATI Radeon R420 (X800) or newer supported, ATI Radeon R700 (HD 4000) or newer recommended.
> Intel GMA 950 (945G) or newer supported, Intel GMA X4500HD (G45) or newer recommended.
> NVIDIA GeForce 6-Series and newer supported, GeForce 8-Series and newer recommended.

They haven't updated the FAQ or requirements about support of Mac yet. Linux is not supported, not sure if it runs in Wine though.
What scares me is that you need to have UPnP fully opened for all incoming calls in your router/firewall.

I'm not 100% on this information, because the team behind voddler doesn't answer many questions. Anyways, seems like the 13GB is for cache for other voddler users. Meaning it's filesharing if that is really true, but probably only bits and pieces. Just so that Voddler doesn't have to have everything on their own servers.
The server client is always running using bandwidth, memory and cpu time. Not a lot, but still more then I wanted it to so I closed it down and only start it when I want to see a movie.
Is

That is correct, but in my case it did not work. I don't know if it was because it was trying to connect at the same time as it froze that made it so [Command-Option-Esc] didn't work. I could be completely wrong, but I have noticed that programs which connect to the net and freeze up while doing so on a Mac can be hard to kill at times. Firefox with lots of plugins does this from time to time so that a kill -p pid in terminal wont work. Could just be my imagination though. And it has only happened once so f

Why, oh why do they insist on this selling point of "no risks of computer viruses".I'm always concerned that "legitimate" sources will contain a dodgy driver or a rootkit. No such concerns with the latest aXXo rip.

One of the reasons I stopped going to theaters to watch movies was that after I paid to get in, I was sitting through commercials (not just trailers, but commercials). I decided that I might as well stay home and wait for the movies on non-premium cable.

One of the reasons I stopped going to theaters to watch movies was that after I paid to get in, I was sitting through commercials (not just trailers, but commercials). I decided that I might as well stay home and wait for the movies on non-premium cable.

Same here.
The funny thing is they blame piracy for their own failure.

Well thats probably the case if you go to movies to only watch a movie. I never do just that, but it's nice to sometimes go out with a girlfriend and on the way or after go eat at a restaurant too. In that case the ads dont really bother that much. But if I just want to watch a movie, yeah I rather do it home from my more comfortable bed naked drinking beer.

Well thats probably the case if you go to movies to only watch a movie. I never do just that, but it's nice to sometimes go out with a girlfriend and on the way or after go eat at a restaurant too. In that case the ads dont really bother that much. But if I just want to watch a movie, yeah I rather do it home from my more comfortable bed naked drinking beer.

I don't know what do you do with you girlfriend, but watching adds together is not on my list.

Before I was married, I did that a couple of times. Then I realized that the purpose of a date was to interact with the woman I was with. Movie theaters are very bad venues for interacting with a woman. If you talk to her everyone else considers you rude (and she may as well). The seats are designed so that it is very hard to snuggle (or do any more intimate physical interaction).
I discovered there are many better options to take a woman for a date. They are frequently less expensive and, as a bonus, most

I still think one of the reasons Blu Ray won in the end is because HD required the movie start when you loaded the DvD. My Disney produced Blu Ray discs are loaded with nearly a dozen ads and such before the movie selection screen pops.

Its a constant pushing of "Next Chapter" after loading many Blu Ray titles. If they going to stream them over the net for free after a barrage of ads the least they could do is reduce the price of Blu Ray discs. Fortunately I haven't had a problem with skipping the ads, bu

At least you can hit Next Chapter and skip the ads. When I load a Sesame Street DVD in for my kids to watch, I'm forced to see the same "supporting Sesame Street supports kids around the world" commercial read by Whoppi Goldberg. Next Chapter is locked so you can't skip it (though I think some of the newer DVDs might have fixed this). So my kids (unaccustomed to ads thanks to DVRs) want to know why they can't just get right to the movie.

One of the reasons I stopped going to theaters to watch movies was that after I paid to get in, I was sitting through commercials (not just trailers, but commercials).

I'm not going to excuse the ads, I hate them too, but you do realize that most (if not all) of the money that you paid to get into the movie went right back to the movie studios? Why do you think that popcorn and a soda cost to much at the movies? They need to pay their employees and run the entire facility on popcorn sales. When those didn

Having commercials before a movie is an annoyance, but the movie itself is uninterrupted, while non-premium cable's movies are not only interrupted by commercials, but "edited for content" as well.

I won't watch a movie that's rated higher than PG-13 on TV, because they butcher them. There was a movie a couple of weeks ago Tami wanted me to watch about a woman in rehab (made me think of Amy), saying it was hilarious. We watched it and she said "I remember it being funnier than that." I mentioned the inevitab

That works fine several days after the movie first comes out. Before then, you have to be early to get a better seat.

Well then that's the choice you make, isn't it?

- See the movie on or shortly after release day- Get a great seat- Skip the commercialsChoose any two.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

There is, of course, another option...- Go see the pre-premiere- Get a great seat 'cos these are at impossible hours like 1am- Skip the commercials if you want- Deal with any technical issues that might arise due

Why should I have to make choices like that if I'm a paying customer? If the theater wants my money, they should be bending over backwards to give me a better experience than what I get at home.
This is what I would expect:

Ability to buy my tickets online, so that I don't have to wait in line or worry about getting in to a new release.

Ability to reserve specific seats when purchasing my tickets, so I don't have to get to the show early for good seats.

No extra charge for buying tickets online. Running an online shopping cart should be cheaper than paying a ticket salesperson, so there is no justification for extra fees.

No ads. No more than 3 trailers.

Do I sound picky? Perhaps. I have a nice TV at home, and renting movies is very cheap. It is up to the theater to give me a reason to not just stay home.

As a Canadian who's lived in Oslo for a little over 2 years I can tell you that it meets 4/5 of your requirements.

You can buy your tickets online for the exact same price as you'd get them in the cinema. All seats are assigned, and there's usually only 2-3 trailers. Unfortunately there's still the barrage of ads before the trailers, but since your seats are guaranteed, you can simply show up 5-10 minutes after the start time and avoid all of that:)

You've pretty much described Arclight Cinemas [arclightcinemas.com]. It's a very small part of Pacific Theaters [pacifictheatres.com], with only two currently in existence, both in Southern California.
Online tickets - check
Reserved seats - check
No extra charge....pretty sure, check. You can even print them up at home.
No ads - check. Not sure how many trailers they limit to, but they aren't excessive about it in any case.

The downside, of course, is that Arclight is several dollars more expensive per ticket, with fewer w

The largest theater chain in Sweden, Svensk Film Bio [www.sf.se], lets you choose your seats when you register online (with no extra cost), plays about two minutes of ads and two trailers before the movie starts. I'd rather see no ads and no trailers, but hey, they have to show something while everyone is settling down. It doesn't really bother me.

Oddly enough, in NL, for various theaters..- You can buy your tickets online (actually, you have to print a barcode and collect from a machine/the cashier.. usually no rows at the machines, so that's okay. They're still working on accepting a barcode off of e.g. a mobile phone using a camera system rather than the laser scanner.)- You can reserve specific seats, and even make sure seats are next to eachother if you are going with a/multiple friend(s)- You do pay less by buying online (though it's a just a

It would be expensive for a single theater to build out their own online ticket sales system. However, it would not be too hard for the big national theater chains to set up one system for all of their theaters. The smaller theaters could use a third party ticketing service. There is no reason it needs to be expensive.

I'm not too lazy to stand in line -- I just don't want to waste my time. If tickets were sold online, I wouldn't have to wait in line, and neither would the fanboys. The fanboys would get thei

but without DRM and in common formats. streaming wastes bandwidth each time you want to watch the movie. there is probably a way to rip but with the MPAA involved you can be guaranteed 'the man' is putting in some sort of DRM to try and stop that

"Our customers can be sure that Voddler is totally legal, secure, and that there are no risks of computer viruses infecting their machines from downloaded files"

Finally! The amount of times I've had viruses from video-files have been... Erm... Ohwait.
What video files containing viruses -are- they talking about?,br>
With software they might at least have a point, but I've never seen a video file with a virus.

I was very excited about Voddler (I'm a Spotify premium subscriber, and a big movie buff, so it was just what I'd been waiting for), until I read about how the mac client works.
When installed it takes root access (in beta? how can that be safe?), and the server part never shuts down. That's right, when you're not watching a movie, you're still uploading. When you're out and about with your laptop and on a 3G tether, just checking your email and paying for data transfer, you're still uploading. When you have some real uploading to do (for work or whatever), the only way to turn off the Voddler sharing is to uninstall the server part, and then the client and player stops working.

That's what you get when you let some company, even one that claims to be free, safe, and secure, take over your computer. You've already been 0wn3d! Some of us have safe computers, safely configured, based on safe operating systems we compile ourselves, using safe compilers. The music and movie industries already know we won't be 0wn3d and so they've already counted us out of their target market (although they still lie to the government and pretend as though they tried to actually have us as part of th

The root access-stuff was a bug in the installer. It wasn't supposed to run as root, and it didn't have to. That has been fixed in the latest alpha-release for Mac.

Yes, Voddler is based on file-sharing tech quite similiar to Bittorrent and Spotify. (except that Bittorrent doesnt' stream) Read the FAQ!The developers have said that the uplink rate will be throttled in an upcoming release. I say it again: It is in Alpha!

I like the option to get all my ads up front and then watch a show uninterrupted. Hulu has this feature with some of its teevee offerings. I generally mute the stupid thing for the couple minutes that the ads are running, run to the kitchen grab something to eat, or switch windows and do work there, then when the time's over, I'll watch my show. Essentially the whole thing is ad free at that point. Of course advertisers probably hate me for suggesting we all ignore them.

First you are presented with a very sparse page with a couple areas you can put your name and email address to "register".

Next, if you are so inclined, you enter your email address and name.

Then it says "Thanks for your interest in Voddler!"

Then you receive an email informing you that actually you didn't actually register since the site isn't actually open yet.

Thank you for showing an interest in Voddler!A beta version of Voddler is currently out and we will not add new members at this stage.

But have patience, the official Voddler will soon be released and your name and email will be saved until then. An invitation will find its way to your inbox when the time is right.

I suppose it was a good idea to use a throwaway account for this.

You're an idiot. This is not a phising site, this is a completely legit site, and those who are with the ISP "Bredbandsbolaget" can already use the service. It's the same type of business model that spotify uses. And frankly, if you ever get your fat ass out of the US you'll see how many services aren't available for the rest of us. Not everything comes instantly, jackass.

Wow, this AC should really take a break. The GP is making a valid point security wise.

I myself made the same mistake of going directly and signing up. Of course I got the same email and it means that until the guys show me a real product, they have my name/email to sell it to whoever wants.

And the AC answering with "you're an idiot' and "jackass" is informative... that is more of a flamebait I think...

Well he is also calling it a phishing site, which is just to troll and throw this articles comments offtopic. Even the summary notes that theres tons of people waiting for invitation, so its kind of stupid to think you're just gonna get account like that from their main site.

But interesting note from About Voddler site is "Finally an alternative to illegal downloading is available on the Swedish market.", which makes me think if Voddler is available elsewhere too (atleast nordic and european countries like Spotify has). It might even be that this is specifically developed for Swedish market (at least first), since so large percent of people, specially young, pirate movies and music.

That being said, if this anything close to "Spotify for Movies" I'm really interested. It's been an year that I've used only Spotify for my music listening and it's even more convenience than downloading mp3's and everyone I know is the same thing. Been a premium member for months too.

Welcome to the rest of the world.It's often that us non US-people only get a sparse page with a few fields to enter your data in, only to find out that the service you thought you were registering for doesn't work yet in your country.

Call it phishing if you like, but it's par for the course. It's just that you US-ians don't notice it as often.

I know there's lots of people on slashdot who like to justify their pirating with all these "open", "bad bad record labels" etc bullshit, but truth is that people just want stuff for free and conveniently. As surprising it is after all the years of fighting from industry, it was really surprising that Spotify actually offers legit service that is a lot better than downloading warez. And with both free and paid, all-you-can-eat models. Spotify really changed th

Yeah I agree on that tho. I buy pretty much all games from Steam too because its just so much more convenient than walking to store, and comes with extra features like friends lists, community stuff and the ability to always download the game again when you need to.

I have no interest in pirating. I am willing to pay for movies. I do know it takes money to make them.

However, if the movie industry has already counted me out of their market, then how is it that downloading the movie from a pirate location results in any loss of money on their part for my one download? Sure, I do know that there are people that are actually in the movie industry's target market who are trying to cheat the system and not pay, by using such piracy places. But do NOT assume that everyone

Between pirating and DRMed adware delivery. How about these digital content guys try to sell their stuff at some low price that reflects the reality that making digital copies is incredibly cheap, that we have had bona fide tech advances that make this possible, rather than sticking to now ancient history "per unit" pricing models? Instead of a buck for a song, how about a buck for a download movie and five cents for a song? Something like that. Figure out what bandwith costs them, double that, and offer th

The ad method won't work for them in the long run, people will figure out how to skip the ads, or just ignore them. Just offer the product way cheap with at least some profit in there (that's why I like a clean "double the bandwith costs and no more" method, easy to figure out and still a cheap price), and try volume sales instead. There are potentially six BILLION customers out there who ARE willing to buy things if the price is right and not blatant price gouging.

While nothing is wrong with your idea, let me ask how are the studios going to make flops or other movies that will ultimately be unprofitable? I certainly do not know or even believe most of their reported revenues and p/l statements as they probably cook the books in ways unimaginable, but some productions simply do not make a profit as they have a limited audience attraction(many art movies), or the movie just plain sucked.

Correction: most autobahns (or all of them?) have stretches without speed limits, but all of them have stretches with speed limits, usually near exits or service areas, and in areas where high winds are expected, such as bridges.

Not to mention that Germans are very fond of performing construction and maintenance on the autobahns, where the speed limit is usually low (~80km/h). I think this is where the swede exceeded the speed limit so much that it warranted the 2000€ fine.

Germany is the country with no speed limits on the Autobahn (aka highway). And of course there are zones where there are speed limits. Like when a dangerous area is ahead. (Construction work, sharp curves, traffic jams, crosses, etc can be speed limited.)

What the hell does 'speeding on the autobahn' have to do with Hollywood and our perspective?Not really a priority in life to learn about the Autobahn, not like all of us have a car that can go over 110KmH or for that matter drive our own car across the ocean. Anyways just look up 'Autobahn accident' on Youtube and you will see dozens of videos of foreigner people and lots of British kids crashing their cars on the Autobahn because of too much